Congress cleared a short-term spending measure to keep the government open through December 11, sending it to President Trump's desk nearly a month before the current funding deadline, a rare move that papers over deep divisions in both parties.
The House voted 370, 48 on Tuesday to approve the continuing resolution, which the Senate had already passed by a lopsided 90, 6 margin. The bill buys roughly ten weeks of breathing room past the September 30 expiration of current funding, pushing the next fiscal showdown safely past the November midterm elections. Nineteen Republicans and 29 Democrats voted no.
The bipartisan margin was wide, but the underlying message was blunt: after two record-breaking government shutdowns in the past year, neither party wanted to own a third one weeks before voters head to the polls. The price of that consensus, however, is another punt on the full-year appropriations bills that Congress is supposed to pass every year, and almost never does.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, the Oklahoma Republican who shepherded the measure, acknowledged on the floor that the Senate had tacked on provisions he did not entirely support. The upper chamber added a short-term delay of a congressionally enacted ban on intoxicating hemp products, a pause the White House and the cannabis industry both want in order to negotiate a different deal. Senators also inserted language temporarily blocking a Trump administration rule that would give political appointees more power over how federal grants are distributed.
Cole framed the trade-offs as manageable, telling colleagues on the House floor:
"When we passed our continuing resolution over here, we knew it would change when it got to the Senate. Some of those changes I actually agree with, some of them I don't. But they don't really change the substance of the fact we bought the time that we need to get through the election cycle and hopefully the time that we need to get down to serious bargaining on the other side of it."
That candor, "we bought the time", said more about the state of congressional budgeting than any policy paper could. The House has passed just three of its twelve full-year funding bills. Senate negotiators have not even reached a deal on a top-line spending number. The continuing resolution does not fix any of that. It simply moves the deadline.
Some hard-line Republicans were angry enough about the Senate-added provisions that they vowed to vote against a procedural rule for four unrelated bills, a protest move that could cause problems for Speaker Mike Johnson as he tries to keep his slim majority in line.
House Democrats held their first all-caucus, in-person meeting since the chamber left Washington in July for the long summer recess. In the Capitol basement on Tuesday morning, senior Appropriations Democrat Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut made the case for supporting the funding package, a notable move given her party's usual posture of attacking Republican spending proposals.
Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar of California, himself a member of the Appropriations panel, told reporters he was persuaded.
"That's a big statement from the ranking member. She's my ranking member, so I have a tough time disagreeing with her."
Vice Caucus Chairman Ted Lieu of California was less diplomatic. Lieu pointed out that the shutdown deadline is not until October 1, meaning Congress still had a full month to work on a longer-term package, and argued that Republican leaders were giving up early.
"We have a whole nother month left, and the Republicans who control the House, the Senate and the White House are basically waving the white flag of surrender and saying, 'We don't know how to govern, we don't know how to pass appropriations bills.'"
Lieu then conceded the obvious: he planned to vote for the bill anyway. Johnson's ability to lean on White House support to move legislation has been a recurring feature of this Congress, and the CR's passage followed that pattern, broad bipartisan support despite loud objections from both flanks.
"It is not a good way to run our federal government. But it's the only alternative that's going to be before us, so I'll be voting for it."
That sequence, attack the process, then vote yes, captured the Democratic strategy in miniature. Lieu got his quote for the campaign trail. The government got its funding. Nobody had to take a hard vote.
The continuing resolution's passage almost a month before funding expires is unusual enough to count as progress by recent standards. Congress has lurched from crisis to crisis, and the two shutdowns over the past year left federal workers and military families in limbo while lawmakers traded blame on cable news.
But passing a CR is not the same as governing. A continuing resolution freezes spending at prior-year levels and prevents agencies from starting new programs or adjusting to changed circumstances. It is a placeholder, not a plan. The House has managed to pass only three of its twelve required annual spending bills, and the Senate has not even agreed on a total spending figure, the most basic starting point for any negotiation.
The political incentives are obvious. With midterms approaching, vulnerable incumbents in both parties wanted the shutdown threat off the table. A December 11 deadline pushes the next fight into the lame-duck session, when members who lost their seats have nothing left to lose and members who won have little reason to compromise. Another continuing resolution stretching into the new year is already widely expected.
That cycle, CR to shutdown threat to CR, has become the default mode of federal budgeting. It rewards brinksmanship, punishes planning, and leaves taxpayers funding a government that cannot even decide how much it wants to spend. The pattern has persisted across multiple Congresses and both parties' control, though Republicans now hold the House, Senate, and White House and bear the primary responsibility for breaking the cycle.
Speaker Johnson faces the additional challenge of managing a caucus where Republicans have repeatedly broken ranks on major votes. The 19 GOP members who voted against the CR on Tuesday are a reminder that his majority is narrow and his hard-line members are willing to use procedural leverage to extract concessions.
Two Senate-added provisions deserve scrutiny beyond the headline vote. The first is a short-term delay of the ban on intoxicating hemp products, substances like delta-8 THC that Congress had previously voted to prohibit. Both the White House and the cannabis industry want the delay to buy time for a renegotiated deal, an alignment of interests that should raise questions about who benefits from the pause and what "different deal" is being negotiated behind closed doors.
The second provision temporarily blocks a Trump administration rule that would reshape how federal grants are distributed by shifting authority to political appointees. The rule's supporters say it would bring accountability to a grant process that has long operated on bureaucratic autopilot. Its opponents, including enough Senate Republicans to attach the blocking language, apparently disagree, or at least want more time to evaluate the change.
Neither provision changes the fundamental nature of the CR, as Cole noted. But both illustrate how the Senate uses must-pass spending bills as vehicles for policy riders that would struggle to pass on their own merits. The practice is bipartisan, longstanding, and corrosive to transparent legislating. Voters rarely learn what was tucked into a funding bill until long after the vote.
Democrats, for their part, have used the current Congress to position themselves as the responsible governing party, a framing that requires ignoring the 29 Democratic no votes on Tuesday and the fact that Democratic members regularly break ranks when it suits their districts. Lieu's performance, lambasting the process, then voting yes, was the cleanest example of a party that wants credit for cooperation and blame for dysfunction at the same time.
The bill now goes to President Trump's desk. Once signed, the government stays open through December 11. The midterms will come and go. The lame-duck session will begin. And Congress will face the same question it has failed to answer all year: can it pass full-year spending bills, or will it punt again?
The record suggests another punt. Senate negotiators have not agreed on a top-line number. The House has cleared only three of twelve bills. The political incentives that made a pre-election CR attractive will not magically produce a post-election appetite for hard choices. If anything, the dynamics get worse: outgoing members lose leverage, incoming members have not yet been sworn in, and leadership in both chambers will be consumed by jockeying for committee assignments and floor time in the new Congress.
Cole's floor speech was honest about the strategy: buy time, get past the election, and hope for "serious bargaining on the other side of it." That hope has a poor track record. The past year's two shutdowns did not produce serious bargaining, they produced more CRs, more brinkmanship, and more frustration for the federal workers and military families who depend on stable funding.
A 370, 48 vote looks like bipartisan success. In practice, it is bipartisan agreement to avoid the problem for ten more weeks. The hard votes are still ahead, and nothing about this Congress suggests they will be any easier in December than they were in September.
When both parties agree this enthusiastically to kick the can down the road, taxpayers should check where the road ends, and who picks up the tab when it does.
